
Distributed Solar: The Democratizaton of Energy

Blogroll
- Busting Myths About Heat Pumps Heat pumps are perhaps the most efficient heating and cooling systems available. Recent literature distributed by utilities hawking natural gas and other sources use performance figures from heat pumps as they were available 15 years ago. See today’s.
- All about models
- American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
- GeoEnergy Math Prof Paul Pukite’s Web site devoted to energy derived from geological and geophysical processes and categorized according to its originating source.
- Why It’s So Freaking Hard To Make A Good COVID-19 Model Five Thirty Eight’s take on why pandemic modeling is so difficult
- John Cook's reasons to use Bayesian inference
- The Plastic Pick-Up: Discovering new sources of marine plastic pollution
- Label Noise
- Ives and Dakos techniques for regime changes in series
- All about Sankey diagrams
- Higgs from AIR describing NAO and EA Stephanie Higgs from AIR Worldwide gives a nice description of NAO and EA in the context of discussing “The Geographic Impact of Climate Signals on European Winter Storms”
- AP Statistics: Sampling, by Michael Porinchak Twin City Schools
- "Consider a Flat Pond" Invited talk introducing systems thinking, by Jan Galkowski, at First Parish in Needham, UU, via Zoom
- Carl Safina's blog One of the wisest on Earth
- Quotes by Nikola Tesla Quotes by Nikola Tesla, including some of others he greatly liked.
- Dollars per BBL: Energy in Transition
- Tony Seba Solar energy, electric vehicle, energy storage, and business disruption professor and visionary
- "Impacts of Green New Deal energy plans on grid stability, costs, jobs, health, and climate in 143 countries" (Jacobson, Delucchi, Cameron, et al) Global warming, air pollution, and energy insecurity are three of the greatest problems facing humanity. To address these problems, we develop Green New Deal energy roadmaps for 143 countries.
- Gavin Simpson
- Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI)
- Pat's blog While it is described as “The mathematical (and other) thoughts of a (now retired) math teacher”, this is false humility, as it chronicles the present and past life and times of mathematicians in their context. Recommended.
- NCAR AtmosNews
- Karl Broman
- Earle Wilson
- Leadership lessons from Lao Tzu
- The Keeling Curve: its history History of the Keeling Curve and Charles David Keeling
- distributed solar and matching location to need
- Professor David Draper
- Ted Dunning
- Charlie Kufs' "Stats With Cats" blog “You took Statistics 101. Now what?”
- BioPython A collection of Python tools for quantitative Biology
- Comprehensive Guide to Bayes Rule
- Nadler Strategy, LLC, on sustainability Thinking about business, efficient and effective management, and business value
- Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard on how businesses can help our collective environmental mess Patagonia’s Yvon Chouinard set the standard for how a business can mitigate the ravages of capitalism on earth’s environment. At 81 years old, he’s just getting started.
- Lenny Smith's CHAOS: A VERY SHORT INTRODUCTION This is a PDF version of Lenny Smith’s book of the same title, also available from Amazon.com
- All about ENSO, and lunar tides (Paul Pukite) Historically, ENSO has been explained in terms of winds. But recently — and Dr Paul Pukite has insisted upon this for a long time — the oscillation of ENSO has been explained as a large-scale slosh due to lunar tidal forcing.
- Simon Wood's must-read paper on dynamic modeling of complex systems I highlighted Professor Wood’s paper in https://hypergeometric.wordpress.com/2014/12/26/struggling-with-problems-already-attacked/
- Earth Family Beta MIchael Osborne’s blog on Science and the like
- The Alliance for Securing Democracy dashboard
- In Monte Carlo We Trust The statistics blog of Matt Asher, actually called the “Probability and Statistics Blog”, but his subtitle is much more appealing. Asher has a Manifesto at http://www.statisticsblog.com/manifesto/.
- Darren Wilkinson's introduction to ABC Darren Wilkinson’s introduction to approximate Bayesian computation (“ABC”). See also his post about summary statistics for ABC https://darrenjw.wordpress.com/2013/09/01/summary-stats-for-abc/
- Logistic curves in market disruption From DollarsPerBBL, about logistic or S-curves as models of product take-up rather than exponentials, with notes on EVs
- Beautiful Weeds of New York City
- Number Cruncher Politics
- The Mermaid's Tale A conversation about biological complexity and evolution, and the societal aspects of science
- John Kruschke's "Dong Bayesian data analysis" blog Expanding and enhancing John’s book of same title (now in second edition!)
- Risk and Well-Being
- Rasmus Bååth's Research Blog Bayesian statistics and data analysis
- American Statistical Association
- OOI Data Nuggets OOI Ocean Data Lab: The Data Nuggets
climate change
- AIP's history of global warming science: impacts The American Institute of Physics has a fine history of the science of climate change. This link summarizes the history of impacts of climate change.
- Équiterre Equiterre helps build a social movement by encouraging individuals, organizations and governments to make ecological and equitable choices, in a spirit of solidarity.
- Simple models of climate change
- Tuft's Professor Kenneth Lang on the physical chemistry of the Greenhouse Effect
- Climate change: Evidence and causes A project of the UK Royal Society: (1) Answers to key questions, (2) evidence and causes, and (3) a short guide to climate science
- An open letter to Steve Levitt
- RealClimate
- “The Irrelevance of Saturation: Why Carbon Dioxide Matters'' (Bart Levenson)
- Wind sled Wind sled: A zero carbon way of exploring ice sheets
- Ricky Rood's “What would happen to climate if we (suddenly) stopped emitting GHGs today?
- World Weather Attribution
- Updating the Climate Science: What path is the real world following? From Professors Makiko Sato & James Hansen of Columbia University
- ATTP summarizes all that stuff about Committed Warming from AND THEN THERE’S PHYSICS
- James Powell on sampling the climate consensus
- Simple box models and climate forcing IMO one of Tamino’s best posts illustrating climate forcing using simple box models
- Energy payback period for solar panels Considering everything, how long do solar panels have to operate to offset the energy used to produce them?
- "Climate science is setttled enough"
- Exxon-Mobil statement on UNFCCC COP21
- The great Michael Osborne's latest opinions Michael Osborne is a genius operative and champion of solar energy. I have learned never to disregard ANYTHING he says. He is mentor of Karl Ragabo, and the genius instigator of the Texas renewable energy miracle.
- NOAA Annual Greenhouse Gas Index report The annual assessment by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration of the radiative forcing from constituent atmospheric greenhouse gases
- Sir David King David King’s perspective on climate, and the next thousands of years for humanity
- "Impacts of Green New Deal energy plans on grid stability, costs, jobs, health, and climate in 143 countries" (Jacobson, Delucchi, Cameron, et al) Global warming, air pollution, and energy insecurity are three of the greatest problems facing humanity. To address these problems, we develop Green New Deal energy roadmaps for 143 countries.
- Anti—Anti-#ClimateEmergency Whether to declare a climate emergency is debatable. But some critics have gone way overboard.
- Mrooijer's Global Temperature Explorer
- Warming slowdown discussion
- On Thomas Edison and Solar Electric Power
- SolarLove
- Mathematics and Climate Research Network The Mathematics and Climate Research Network (MCRN) engages mathematicians to collaborating on the cryosphere, conceptual model validation, data assimilation, the electric grid, food systems, nonsmooth systems, paleoclimate, resilience, tipping points.
- Nick Bower's "Scared Scientists"
- The Green Plate Effect Eli Rabett’s “The Green Plate Effect”
- The beach boondoggle Prof Rob Young on how owners of beach property are socializing their risks at costs to all of us, not the least being it seems coastal damage is less than it actually is
- Interview with Wally Broecker Interview with Wally Broecker
- David Appell's early climate science
- Solar Gardens Community Power
- "Lessons of the Little Ice Age" (Farber) From Dan Farber, at LEGAL PLANET
- Climate impacts on retail and supply chains
- `Who to believe on climate change': Simple checks By Bart Verheggen
- Professor Robert Strom's compendium of resources on climate change Truly excellent
- "Getting to the Energy Future We Want," Dr Steven Chu
- The Keeling Curve The first, and one of the best programs for creating a spatially significant long term time series of atmospheric concentrations of CO2. Started amongst great obstacles by one, smart determined guy, Charles David Keeling.
- Climate Communication Hassol, Somerville, Melillo, and Hussin site communicating climate to the public
- Spectra Energy exposed
- CLIMATE ADAM Previously from the Science news staff at the podcast of Nature (“Nature Podcast”), the journal, now on YouTube, encouraging climate action through climate comedy.
- Ellenbogen: There is no Such Thing as Wind Turbine Syndrome
- Andy Zucker's "Climate Change and Psychology"
- "Warming Slowdown?" (part 2 of 2) The idea of a global warming slowdown or hiatus is critically examined, emphasizing the literature, the datasets, and means and methods for telling such. The second part.
- Skeptical Science
- All Models Are Wrong Dr Tamsin Edwards blog about uncertainty in science, and climate science
- Documenting the Climate Deniarati at work
- Transitioning to fully renewable energy Professor Saul Griffiths talks to transitioning the customer journey, from a dependency upon fossil fuels to an electrified future
Archives
Jan Galkowski
Category Archives: mathematics
Gee, if all maths classes were like this, they’d be exhausting …
Posted in mathematics
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Jeff wins the Adams Prize
My son, Jeff, is Professor of Mathematics, University College London. The Adams Prize is described here, and here on Wikipedia. It’s a Big Deal. To quote the description of it from the University of Cambridge: The Adams Prize is one … Continue reading
Posted in mathematics
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Humble Alternatives to Daylight Savings Time — Math with Bad Drawings
From the ever clever and entertaining Ben Orlin. And the drawings really aren’t bad.
Posted in Ben Orlin, mathematics
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a song in praise of data scientist Rebekah Jones
I linked to Rebekah Jones‘ keynote address at the August 2020 Data Science Conference on COVID-19 sponsored by the National Institute for Statistical Science. Below is a song in tribute to her, wishing her well. (h/t Bill McKibben) We’re doing … Continue reading
Posted in American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Mathematical Society, American Statistical Association, Boston Ethical Society, children as political casualties, Data for Good, data science, geographic, geographic information systems, International Society for Bayesian Statistics, journalism, mathematics, New England Statistical Society, pandemic, Rebekah Jones, Risky Talk, science, Significance, statistical ecology, statistics, the problem of evil, whistleblowing, ``The tide is risin'/And so are we''
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Complexity vs Simplicity in Geophysics
Really interesting mechanistic reductionism illustrating what it means to explain phenomena scientifically. It’s all about the maths.
Posted in abstraction, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Meteorological Association, American Statistical Association, Azimuth Project, complex systems, control theory, differential equations, dynamical systems, eigenanalysis, information theoretic statistics, mathematics, Mathematics and Climate Research Network, mechanistic models, nonlinear systems, Paul Pukite, spectra, spectral methods, spectroscopy, theoretical physics, wave equations, WHT
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“We will love science and its controversies.”
We will continue, Professor. With all the teachers and professors in France, we will teach history, its glories and its vicissitudes. We will introduce literature, music, all works of soul and spirit. We will love with all our strength the … Continue reading
Posted in Charlie Hebdo, martyrs to truth, mathematics, religion, science
Tagged Hypatia, salmon rushdie
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We are all Mathematicians
Bobby Seagull. Great.
Posted in mathematics, mathematics education, maths
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Reanalysis of business visits from deployments of a mobile phone app
Updated, 20th October 2020 This reports a reanalysis of data from the deployment of a mobile phone app, as reported in: M. Yauck, L.-P. Rivest, G. Rothman, “Capture-recapture methods for data on the activation of applications on mobile phones“, Journal … Continue reading
Posted in Bayesian computational methods, biology, capture-mark-recapture, capture-recapture, Christian Robert, count data regression, cumulants, diffusion, diffusion processes, Ecological Society of America, ecology, epidemiology, experimental science, field research, Gibbs Sampling, Internet measurement, Jean-Michel Marin, linear regression, mark-recapture, mathematics, maximum likelihood, Monte Carlo Statistical Methods, multilist methods, multivariate statistics, non-mechanistic modeling, non-parametric statistics, numerics, open source scientific software, Pierre-Simon Laplace, population biology, population dynamics, quantitative biology, quantitative ecology, R, R statistical programming language, sampling, sampling algorithms, segmented package in R, statistical ecology, statistical models, statistical regression, statistical series, statistics, stepwise approximation, stochastic algorithms, surveys, V. M. R. Muggeo
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“The truly common core”
Repost of “The truly common core“, from Ben Orlin‘s Math with Bad Drawings blog. https://mathwithbaddrawings.com/2020/02/19/uncommon-core-standards/
Posted in education, mathematics, mathematics education, maths
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Cumulants and the Cornish-Fisher Expansion
“Consider the following.” (Bill Nye the Science Guy) There are random variables drawn from the same kind of probability distribution, but with different parameters for each. In this example, I’ll consider random variables , that is, each drawn from a … Continue reading
Another reason why the future of Science and STEM education in the United States is cloudy
From Nature‘s “Universities spooked by Trump order tying free speech to grants“, with the subheading “White House policy will require universities to certify that they protect free speech to remain eligible for research funding”, comes this chilling news: US President … Continue reading
Posted in American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Mathematical Society, American Statistical Association, an ignorant American public, an uncaring American public, anti-intellectualism, anti-science, climate change, Commonwealth of Massachusetts, emigration, European Union, mathematics, science, United States
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Series, symmetrized Normalized Compressed Divergences and their logit transforms
(Major update on 11th January 2019. Minor update on 16th January 2019.) On comparing things The idea of a calculating a distance between series for various purposes has received scholarly attention for quite some time. The most common application is … Continue reading
Posted in Akaike Information Criterion, bridge to somewhere, computation, content-free inference, data science, descriptive statistics, divergence measures, engineering, George Sughihara, information theoretic statistics, likelihood-free, machine learning, mathematics, model comparison, model-free forecasting, multivariate statistics, non-mechanistic modeling, non-parametric statistics, numerical algorithms, statistics, theoretical physics, thermodynamics, time series
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The Johnson-Lindenstrauss Lemma, and the paradoxical power of random linear operators. Part 1.
Updated, 2018-12-04 I’ll be discussing the ramifications of: William B. Johnson and Joram Lindenstrauss, “Extensions of Lipschitz mappings into a Hilbert space, Contemporary Mathematics, 26:189–206, 1984. for several posts here. Some introduction and links to proofs and explications will be … Continue reading
Posted in clustering, data science, dimension reduction, information theoretic statistics, Johnson-Lindenstrauss Lemma, k-NN, Locality Sensitive Hashing, mathematics, maths, multivariate statistics, non-parametric model, numerical algorithms, numerical linear algebra, point pattern analysis, random projections, recommender systems, science, stochastic algorithms, stochastics, subspace projection methods
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Numbers, feelings, and imagination
“But numbers don’t make noises. They don’t have colours. You can’t taste them or touch them. They don’t smell of anything. They don’t have feelings. They don’t make you feel. And they make for pretty boring stories.” That’s from here, … Continue reading
Posted in mathematics, maths, numbers, numerics, oceanography
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Sampling: Rejection, Reservoir, and Slice
An article by Suilou Huang for catatrophe modeler AIR-WorldWide of Boston about rejection sampling in CAT modeling got me thinking about pulling together some notes about sampling algorithms of various kinds. There are, of course, books written about this subject, … Continue reading
Posted in accept-reject methods, American Statistical Association, Bayesian computational methods, catastrophe modeling, data science, diffusion processes, empirical likelihood, Gibbs Sampling, insurance, Markov Chain Monte Carlo, mathematics, Mathematics and Climate Research Network, maths, Monte Carlo Statistical Methods, multivariate statistics, numerical algorithms, numerical analysis, numerical software, numerics, percolation theory, Python 3 programming language, R statistical programming language, Radford Neal, sampling, slice sampling, spatial statistics, statistics, stochastic algorithms, stochastic search
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Fast means, fast moments (originally devised 1984)
(Updated 4th December 2018.) There are many devices available for making numerical calculations fast. Modern datasets and computational problems apply stylized architectures, and use approaches to problems including special algorithms for just calculating dominant eigenvectors or using non-classical statistical mechanisms … Continue reading
climate model democracy
“One of the most interesting things about the MIP ensembles is that the mean of all the models generally has higher skill than any individual model.” We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all models are created equal, that … Continue reading
Posted in American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Meteorological Association, American Statistical Association, AMETSOC, Anthropocene, attribution, Bayesian model averaging, Bloomberg, citizen science, climate, climate business, climate change, climate data, climate disruption, climate education, climate justice, Climate Lab Book, climate models, coastal communities, coastal investment risks, complex systems, differential equations, disruption, dynamic linear models, dynamical systems, ecology, emergent organization, ensemble methods, ensemble models, ensembles, Eric Rignot, evidence, fear uncertainty and doubt, FEMA, forecasting, free flow of labor, global warming, greenhouse gases, greenwashing, Humans have a lot to answer for, Hyper Anthropocene, Jennifer Francis, Joe Romm, Kevin Anderson, Lévy flights, LBNL, leaving fossil fuels in the ground, liberal climate deniers, mathematics, mathematics education, model-free forecasting, multivariate adaptive regression splines, National Center for Atmospheric Research, obfuscating data, oceanography, open source scientific software, optimization, perceptrons, philosophy of science, phytoplankton
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These are ethical “AI Principles” from Google, but they might as well be `technological principles’
This is entirely adapted from this link, courtesy of Google and Alphabet. Objectives Be socially beneficial. Avoid creating or reinforcing unfair bias. Be built and tested for safety. Be accountable to people. Incorporate privacy design principles. Uphold high standards of … Continue reading
Posted in American Statistical Association, artificial intelligence, basic research, Bayesian, Boston Ethical Society, complex systems, computation, corporate citizenship, corporate responsibility, deep recurrent neural networks, emergent organization, ethical ideals, ethics, extended producer responsibility, friends and colleagues, Google, Google Pixel 2, humanism, investments, machine learning, mathematics, moral leadership, natural philosophy, politics, risk, science, secularism, technology, The Demon Haunted World, the right to know, Unitarian Universalism, UU, UU Humanists
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When linear systems can’t be solved by linear means
Linear systems of equations and their solution form the cornerstone of much Engineering and Science. Linear algebra is a paragon of Mathematics in the sense that its theory is what mathematicians try to emulate when they develop theory for many … Continue reading
The Rule of 135
From SingingBanana.
Is the answer to the democratization of Science doing more Citizen Science?
I have been following, with keen interest, the post and comment thread pertaining to “Democratising science” at the blog I monitor daily, … and Then There’s Physics. I think the core subject being discussed is a little different from my … Continue reading
Posted in American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Meteorological Association, American Statistical Association, AMETSOC, astronomy, astrophysics, biology, citizen data, citizen science, citizenship, data science, ecology, education, environment, evidence, life purpose, local self reliance, marine biology, mathematics, mathematics education, maths, moral leadership, new forms of scientific peer review, open source scientific software, science, science education, statistics, the green century, the right to know
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Chesterton’s fence, ecological sensitivity, and the disruption of ecological services
Hat tip to Matt Levine for introducing me to the term Chesteron’s fence: Chesterton’s fence is the principle that reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood. … In the matter of … Continue reading
Happy Newtonmas!
When knowledge conquered fear … And, what better way to celebrate than watching the National Geographic Cosmos episode, When knowledge conquered fear, hosted by the great Dr Neil deGrasse Tyson, Director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City.
Cathy O’Neil’s WEAPONS OF MATH DESTRUCTION: A Review
(Revised and updated Monday, 24th October 2016.) Weapons of Math Destruction, Cathy O’Neil, published by Crown Random House, 2016. This is a thoughtful and very approachable introduction and review to the societal and personal consequences of data mining, data science, … Continue reading
Posted in citizen data, citizen science, citizenship, civilization, compassion, complex systems, criminal justice, Daniel Kahneman, data science, deep recurrent neural networks, destructive economic development, economics, education, engineering, ethics, Google, ignorance, Joseph Schumpeter, life purpose, machine learning, Mathbabe, mathematics, mathematics education, maths, model comparison, model-free forecasting, numerical analysis, numerical software, open data, optimization, organizational failures, planning, politics, prediction, prediction markets, privacy, rationality, reason, reasonableness, risk, silly tech devices, smart data, sociology, Techno Utopias, testing, the value of financial assets, transparency
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Polls, Political Forecasting, and the Plight of Five Thirty Eight
On 17th October 2016 AT 7:30 p.m., Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com wrote about how, as former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s polling numbers got better, it was more difficult for FiveThirtyEight‘s models to justify increasing her probability of winning, although … Continue reading
Posted in abstraction, American Statistical Association, anemic data, citizen science, citizenship, civilization, economics, education, forecasting, information theoretic statistics, mathematics, maths, politics, prediction markets, sociology, the right to know, theoretical physics, thermodynamics
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“All models are wrong. Some models are useful.” — George Box
(Image courtesy of the Damien Garcia.) As a statistician and quant, I’ve thought hard about that oft-cited Boxism. I’m not sure I agree. It’s not that there is such a thing as a perfect model, or correct model, whatever in … Continue reading
Posted in abstraction, American Association for the Advancement of Science, astronomy, astrophysics, mathematics, model-free forecasting, numerics, perceptions, physical materialism, physics, rationality, reason, reasonableness, science, spatial statistics, splines, statistics, the right to know, theoretical physics, time series
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Repaired R code for Markov spatial simulation of hurricane tracks from historical trajectories
(Slight update, 28th June 2020.) I’m currently studying random walk and diffusion processes and their connections with random fields. I’m interested in this because at the core of dynamic linear models, Kalman filters, and state-space methods there is a random … Continue reading
Posted in American Meteorological Association, American Statistical Association, AMETSOC, Arthur Charpentier, atmosphere, diffusion, diffusion processes, dynamic linear models, dynamical systems, environment, geophysics, hurricanes, Kalman filter, Kerry Emanuel, Lévy flights, Lorenz, Markov chain random fields, mathematics, mathematics education, maths, MCMC, mesh models, meteorological models, meteorology, model-free forecasting, Monte Carlo Statistical Methods, numerical analysis, numerical software, oceanography, open data, open source scientific software, physics, random walk processes, random walks, science, spatial statistics, state-space models, statistical dependence, statistics, stochastic algorithms, stochastics, time series
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“Holy crap – an actual book!”
You’ll find links to Cathy O’Neil’s important book in the Blogroll here, as well as a link to reviews of it. I have not read it yet. While I have pre-ordered it, it’s not available. I have read the reviews, … Continue reading
Posted in American Association for the Advancement of Science, Buckminster Fuller, business, citizen science, citizenship, civilization, complex systems, confirmation bias, data science, data streams, deep recurrent neural networks, denial, economics, education, engineering, ethics, evidence, Internet, investing, life purpose, machine learning, mathematical publishing, mathematics, mathematics education, maths, moral leadership, multivariate statistics, numerical software, numerics, obfuscating data, organizational failures, politics, population biology, prediction, prediction markets, privacy, quantitative biology, quantitative ecology, rationality, reason, reasonableness, rhetoric, risk, Schnabel census, smart data, sociology, statistical dependence, statistics, the right to be and act stupid, the right to know, the value of financial assets, transparency, UU Humanists
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France, and Mathematics
Cédric Villani, does Mathematics. “Problems worthy of attack, prove their worth by hitting back.” — Piet Hein

